State asks court to postpone Migron evacuation by 30 days

The government petitioned the High Court of Justice on Sunday to grant it a 30-day extension for the evacuation of the Migron outpost, saying the army could not carry out that mission during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan and that new housing had yet to be completed for the families set to be evicted.

The petition to the court recognized that an earlier request to delay the evacuation until November 2015 was rejected, but said that a shorter, one-month delay was reasonable. The court had ordered that the evacuation be carried out by August 1 after it determined the outpost was built on privately owned Palestinian land.

[mappress mapid=”1956″]

A deposition by the commander of Central Command, Maj.-Gen. Nitzan Alon, said Alon feared right-wing interference — possibly violent interference — with the dismantling of the outpost. “In my professional opinion,” Alon wrote, “resistance to the evacuation during the month of Ramadan could cause very real harm to the public order and security” in the West Bank, hinting at possible Arab reactions to such resistance.

Alon noted that potential violence would likely come from people who were not residents of the outpost, but rather from “other groups” who planned to stop the evacuation. The Muslim holiday of Ramadan will end in the third week of August, he said, and asked that the court take that date into consideration.

A second reason given for the state’s request was the need to complete construction of new housing for the families who will be removed from Migron. The petition states that the court rejected the request to delay the dismantling of the outpost until permanent housing could be completed in 2015, but noted that the court did grant an extension until August 1 to build temporary housing.

According to the papers presented to the court, on April 19 the government approved plans for temporary housing for those families set to be removed from Migron, and a special committee followed the progress of the planned neighborhood.

However, the petition said, “On July 15 the government was informed for the first time [highlighted in the original] that there would be a one- or two-week delay” in the construction of the new housing. In addition, the state said it would take a week to demolish the houses after all the residents left.

The request also mentioned that recent papers submitted by some of the settlers in Migron, in which they claimed to have purchased the land, could change the legal situation.

Israel Radio reported Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein said that despite this possibility, he would refrain from petitioning on behalf of the government based on the matter of the land’s ownership, since the state had already agreed to the evacuation of the outpost in light of the court’s ruling.

Peace Now director general Yariv Oppenheimer said, “Israel has lost its sense of shame,” accusing the government of seeking any excuse to avoid implementing the evacuation and of capitulating to pro-settlement radicals who have carried out price tag acts of extremism.